AI Enables Employment for Individuals with Cognitive Disabilities

by Scott Muniz | Sep 21, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This article is written by Humans of IT Community Ambassador and Business Applications MVP, Nathan Lasnoski (in partnership with Windows Development MVP Min Maung), who shares how artificial intelligence can be used to enable employment and functional opportunities for individuals with cognitive disabilities.

What responsibility does technology (and do technologists) have in creating innovation that leads to the realization and fulfillment of a human being? Does technology create a new generation of unfairly applied have and have-nots?  We can use technology to drastically improve the positive tech impact on human involvement and engagement, especially for individuals with disabilities who are often excluded from opportunities within society. In this story we talk about the work done at Clover to enable individuals with cognitive disabilities to engage in opportunities that were previously thought impossible.  

USING AI FOR GOOD BEYOND ANY ONE INDUSTRY: EMPLOYMENT FOR THE COGNITIVELY DISABLED

Clover Technologies wanted its warehouses to be the best workplace environments among any of its competitors. To get there, we built a mixed-reality platform leveraging a multi-component scanner, headset, visual, and audio input. The idea was to optimize the picking experience for a worker by providing instructions on where they should go, when, and how, augmenting it with quality control, location awareness, and easy scanning capabilities. Then, this idea expanded further: if we could provide impact to capable workers, why not ones with cognitive disabilities, such as Down syndrome or autism?  

Did you know that less than 10% of individuals with Down syndrome and cognitive disabilities are employed? We believe that tech can help empower all individuals to be productive and have the ability to be gainfully employed. Clover, Concurrency (with MVPs Min Maung and Nathan Lasnoski), Microsoft, and Gigi’s Playhouse Down syndrome development centers partnered to do something about it. We realized these individuals could do meaningful warehouse work with a human assistant, and we wanted to simulate this assistance with technology.

AZURE COMPONENTS IN THE OPEN-SOURCE SOLUTION

We combined the headset, audio input, visual input and hand-attached scanner to enable an individual to work in the warehouse. We proved the success of the technology with one individual, then expanded to more, bringing groups from Gigi’s Playhouse to experience the difference. The solution leverages Microsoft Azure Cognitive Services, Azure ML, Azure SQL, Azure Speech and location awareness. 

The architecture made use of the dispatcher modules to facilitate routing between QnA maker AI models, weather, fun engagement, and third party applications.

You can see here how the project evolved over time. We started with initial pilot capabilities, moved into validation, learnings in a real environment with real people, then moving into open source.

This AI for Good solution is now available on open source in order to increase its impact for good.  Large suppliers, manufacturers, and stores are asking to leverage it to improve their own working environments. The result is a better workplace and a larger base of potential employees for companies to hire from. We know of nothing out there that better demonstrates the power of AI to create jobs for those most at risk than this technology. Visit AI For Good Technologies (aitechnologyforgood.com) to join the Open Source Community on GitHub.

WORLDWIDE RELEVANCE

This gets to a critical point about the relevance and impact of this work. When a large company like Clover can achieve this level of impact, leaders at even larger companies can begin to see their own opportunities to help empower others in the community. The impact has been proven out across hundreds of Microsoft customers—in tours, reference calls for the field sales team, and at Microsoft’s DTA.  At the DTA presentation, the story “brought the house down” without a dry eye in the theatre, driving excitement about what is possible when leaders see AI not as “nice to have” but “need to have”— in order to transform business operations and people’s work opportunities. Now, as organizations look to survive, recover, and thrive beyond the COVID-19 pandemic, broadening employment opportunities on both the employer and employee side becomes even more compelling than before. How will YOU use your tech skills to help empower others today?

#HumansofIT

#AIforGood

Workplace devices are the new “free snacks”

by Scott Muniz | Sep 21, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

Onsite gyms. Stocked refrigerators and gourmet cafeterias. Catered morale events and offsite retreats. Hallway conversations and conference room whiteboarding sessions. If workplace facilities and perks help people feel more comfortable, productive, and valued, those investments stop paying off when most people work remotely.

Let’s face it: the sudden global migration from on-premises to work-from-anywhere computing has transformed the device user experience into the entire workplace experience.

Many organizations have understandably deprioritized device user experience in the face of economic pressures and security threats that have strained IT bandwidth in the transition.

What does that look like? Devices that hang or crash, taking 10 or more minutes to reboot. Disruptive remote troubleshooting sessions. Important files getting lost in email – and worse: version control issues – as colleagues adopt digital collaboration tools.

When the device is the only conduit for literally all workplace experiences, there are no free snacks to balance out the inconveniences, disruptions, and frustrations adding up over the course of months.

More likely than not, your organization can relate. Analyst Josh Bersin finds the #1 employee concern is tech for remote work. IDG reports that 44% of organizations say they need new tech to address the new work dynamic. And AppDynamics says that 61% of IT professionals feel more pressure at work than ever.

Accelerating the journey to modern management

As a senior program manager with the Microsoft Managed Desktop customer acceleration team, I help customers modernize endpoint management to delight end users, protect data, and reclaim IT bandwidth for digital transformation..

If you share these goals, I encourage you to check out my session at Microsoft Ignite 2020, Accelerating the journey to modern management, which covers the following:

• How work evolution strains IT bandwidth, security, device user experience, especially in the context of economic uncertainty,
• How modern management is shown to help organizations resolve those issues,
• What Microsoft Managed Desktop does to accelerate the journey to modern management,
• Technical and non-technical considerations that affect deployment timelines, and
• Real Microsoft Managed Desktop customer onboarding journeys ranging from six weeks to six months.

As promised at the end of my session, this docs page will help you get ready for Microsoft Managed Desktop enrollment. It covers prerequisites, readiness tools, app preparation, environment configuration, and other tasks you’ll encounter as you work to modernize.

Additional modernization resources

Wherever you are on your journey to modern device management, you’ll want to check out this guide to Microsoft Endpoint Manager at Ignite. 

Here are several additional promising sessions on topics about managing the new workplace:

• Playing chess on a trampoline: How to innovate in an era of uncertainty
• Building a resilient organization on Microsoft 365
• Reimagining work with the Microsoft 365 platform
• Embrace a New Way of Work with Microsoft 365
• Employee Engagement and Communities in Microsoft 365
• Microsoft 365 administrator updates to enable secure and compliant work from anywhere
• Ask the Expert: Introducing modern admin capabilities to better service Microsoft 365 Apps for enterprise
• What’s new in Microsoft Teams security and compliance
• Microsoft 365: Enabling virtual collaboration for the future of our hybrid work environment

Everyone can access these virtual sessions, which are available on-demand at your convenience. If you find them useful, please let me know in comments.

And if you’d like to start planning your enterprise journey to Microsoft Managed Desktop, please reach out to your Microsoft account team. My colleagues and I on the customer acceleration team look forward to helping you deliver a secure device experience that helps your people – and your IT organization – feel productive and valued in the work-from-anywhere environment.

How has the evolution of work affected your organization? Which customer deployment story best resembles your situation? Please share your comments below.